SaaS companies are moving toward outcome-based pricing

As AI tools proliferate, the long-standing economics of enterprise software companies—specifically the per-seat model—will inevitably shift. The rise of agentic systems has threatened to compress workflows, streamline the labor needed to execute tasks and, ultimately, cut down on those revenue-generating licenses. This fear came to the fore during February’s “SaaS-pocalypse,” a seismic market event that—while perhaps knee-jerk—wiped out billions of dollars in market value for the great and good of SaaS.

Three main alternatives to the classic seat-based model have emerged: usage-based pricing, outcome-based pricing, and some hybrid of all of the above. In an era of growing ROI concerns, this transition is a big topic of conversation: So are companies moving en masse from seat-based pricing to these alternative offerings?

The great rotation

According to SaaS management platform CloudNuro, over 45% of SaaS companies moved toward outcome-based pricing or hybrid models in 2024, noting the trend accelerated in 2025.

In the last few years, companies like Microsoft, ServiceNow, and HubSpot have jumped on a pricing bandwagon predicated on delivering tangible results: It’s a move that some experts think is beneficial both for client and vendor.

“Instead of picking a model and sticking to it, they’re treating pricing as something like a strategy they can iterate on—like the product growth,” said Elana Lian, partner at Dell Technologies Capital. “Pricing is now a growth lever, not just monetization. Pricing can help drive adoption. It can help upsell over time.”

From the perspective of the buyer, the pricing change has some obvious benefits: Firstly, it reflects how clients are using AI tools in an era where agentic systems promise great efficiencies for both time and money. Secondly, barriers to entry are theoretically lower (the cost of adoption through licenses can be prohibitive for a company in its early growth phase).

Outcome-oriented

HubSpot—which announced pricing changes to its customer and prospecting agents last month—made the switch to an outcome-based model because of the way it saw clients using the tools.

Chief customer officer Jon Dick said HubSpot saw clients initially getting outputs from its tools, but that these outputs wouldn’t always translate into outcomes. HubSpot wanted to “match price to value,” and saw outcome-based pricing as a way to do that.

“Instead of just charging for every contact that’s enrolled in this research, what if we just charge when we feel like there’s enough evidence that they are a contact that’s ready for outreach?” he said.

Dick said a focus on resolutions will resonate with clients, saying “every single sales team knows essentially how many outreaches they need to do to actually get the pipeline they need. So it puts it in a currency.”

Meeting the customer

The shift to outcome-based pricing potentially opens vendors to smaller and midsize companies, which don’t necessarily have the head count to justify larger seat-based contracts.

“Value-based pricing is helping enterprise [clients] generate revenue and to save time,” Lian said. “The price can scale with the amount of impact they’re making—that helps them to align costs with the value. ”

Dick said companies who are more hesitant about investing in AI will now be more willing to do so because of the emphasis on outcomes. The new model also allows HubSpot users to carefully manage their cost base, by giving them oversight on overages (amounts exceeding a set limit), to make sure they are aware of how much they are spending.

Best practices

While there are pros for vendors and clients alike with value-based pricing models, there can be downsides if the strategy is not properly implemented. Lian stressed clients need to be fully aware of how they are being priced to avoid surprise billing, and tiered pricing models with usage caps can help prevent this.

For vendors, she highlighted how moving away from seat-based pricing can impact revenue forecasting.

“Revenue can become less predictable,” she said. “Sometimes you require very strong infrastructure and billing systems to do it for the startup and for the enterprise customer perspective.”

Lian still believes, however, that more companies will shift to this value-based model because of the increased ease of use.

“If it brings value to me, then I’ll keep on using it. If it doesn’t, then I can turn it off,” she said.